Second Toughest Confusion Waitress

I want to make Rez Invaders.

It's possible I'm saying this because the mad melatonin monkey is currently playing how's yer father with my frontal lobes and I've got the kind of tiredness where, even when you do sleep, you dream of being asleep. And it's bright here - like scour the world clean, brave new world, minty fresh, pastel blue, sear your retinas, you're not in Kansas London any more Toto bright.

In this kind of state I can get some pretty funny ideas. Like pub crawling up Kensington Church Street one January and waking up up 6 months later on a beach in Thailand clutching a Mai Tai kind of funny ideas.

So, not all bad then.

That aside I want to write Rez Invaders.

Many years ago I started writing a fairly straightforward shoot-em-up in which you flew down a valley destroying various aliens - the twist in the otherwise vanilla tail being that the shape of the valley and attack waves of the aliens were controlled by music.

It sucked. And it sucked for a whole bunch of reasons. And most of those were my fault but I always thought that the underlying concept was basically sound. And I think I was right because recently I've spent waaaaaay too much time playing Audio Surf.

Audio Surf plays like Wipeout and Tetris bumped into each other at an industry party and had an instantaneous and electric attraction leading them to embark on tempestuous and frenetic love affair which resulted in a startlingly attractive love child whom, in a C&C Music Factory/"Things that make you go hmm" kind of way, looks suspiciously like the last level of Rez.

In essence you feed it some music and it creates a track for you - the gradient of the track (and hence your speed) is based on the tempo of the track. Along the way you dodge the grey blocks and try and pick up coloured blocks to make stacks which convert into points when they get over a certain size. The layout of the blocks being based on the beat and various other elements of the music affect other parts of the track.

It's kind of hard to show with videos what the game's like to play and how well it integrates with the music - you very quickly zone out into that game trance where you're not even concentrating on what you're doing you're just reacting. In fact, in the case of songs that you know well you can find that you can sort of predict what the game's going to do which only heightens the sensation.

Actually there have been a fair few games I've played in the last year which induce this mind meld - pretty much any of the Binary Zoo games will do it, particularly Echoes which builds gradually until you're frantically whipping the mouse around to avoid the marauding chain of red asteroids or the screen wide wave off greens. Grid Wars, obviously inspired by Geometry Wars, is another example.

Space Giraffe practically had the zone as a game play mechanic - at the points when the screen is so saturated with colour that you can't see where the enemy are you're supposed to channel Jean Claude Van Damme in Bloodsport and hear where you should be shooting. It's was a brave choice as a gameplay mechanic - not readily accessible or dumbed down and not to everyone's taste but I still think it should be applauded.

In fact all of these are crying out to be on XBLA (well, Grid/Geometry Wars already is) - especially Audio Surf which is so much better when played with a 360 controller and which would neatly integrate with your music collection which the 360 already has access to. XBLA and Steam together represent one of the most important thing to happen in games in the last decade - they represent a relatively low cost delivery channel for indie developers which in turn means that, instead of multi million dollar bloated triple-A titles retailing for 100 dollars a pop which feel they must artificially pad the length so that you get a good entertainment minutes to bucks ratio, you can blow $5-$10 dollars on a chance or something a little bit different and not feel hard done by if it doesn't work out. Of course if it turns out to be triumphantly awesome you feel like you got an incredible bargain. And in return, by lowering the barrier to entry, we get developers willing to take a risk (such as in Bizarre's case with GW) and a way for indie developers to start getting seriously involved.

Hmm, I appear to have drifted off the road to Pointsville and have began floundering around the musky swamps of What's He Rambling About Now Forest scaring all the flora and fauna by foaming at the mouth and gesticulating wildly.

So what's this Rez Invaders then? Well - Echoes updated the Asteroids concept (it wasn't the first, granted, but it's the most fun variant I've played), Space Giraffe updated the Tempest concept (which was in turn an update of Galaxians which was in turn an update of Space Invaders).

So I'm wondering what I could do if I took some of the ideas from my original music based game and gave it a training montage sequence with Audio Surf to learn from its previous mistakes. Then liberate some gameplay ideas and aesthetics from Rez and take styling cues from things like Echoes and Space Giraffe.

A Space Invaders like top down shooter with Galaxians swooping waves but hook them up so that they're controlled by music. Throw in Rez's multiple lock on system and audio feedback system. Bolt on the insane power ups of Echoes and Grid Wars. Maybe try something a little different - could Space Giraffe's bulling system be co-opted somehow? Finally give it a lick of delicious sexy paint - I personally have a penchant for clean minimalist nouvea vector lines couple with a whole mess of pixel shaders for particle showers, motion blurring and compound eye style gratuitous mind candy.

Cos, you know, I've got so much spare time on my hands to code this up.